MAD ART
A Visual Celebration
of the Art of MAD Magazine
and the Idiots Who Create It.
By Mark Evanier.
Illustrated. 304 pp. New York:
Watson-Guptill Publications.
Paper, $24.95.
MAD magazine was something of an etiquette book for my brothers and me growing up in Canton, Ohio, in the 1950's and 60's. It taught us -- as it has taught readers for a few generations -- how to make fun of all kinds of adult behavior, from suburbanites' competitive barbecuing and car buying to cosmopolitan hipsters' faux-casual clothing and hairstyles.
It showed us how to satirize movies we weren't allowed to see yet; for many years its versions were the only ones I knew of such cultural masterpieces as ''Who in the Heck Is Virginia Woolf?,'' ''For the Birds'' and ''King Korn.'' It pilloried political figures like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, whom we weren't old enough to vote against, and did it in language we could understand -- Ecch! Splorp! Glik! -- and with background visual puns that went over our heads. It is still at it, with recent parodies like ''Bored of the Rings'' and ''America's Most Wanton.''
Reading Mark Evanier's ''Mad Art'' is a chance to see who our teachers in sarcastic manners are. Evanier is a former comic book writer and current collaborator with a longtime Mad artist, Sergio Aragonés. His book is a detail-rich collection of artists who have worked for Mad and an insider's look at the magazine's gag artists, political caricaturists and Alfred E. Neuman portraitists. Particularly valuable are its reporting on artists from the early years of the magazine and interviews of those still at work.
Its wealth of information makes it a combined portrait of sociological as well as artistic interest. When the magazine began in 1952 the artists were mainly male, young, World War II veterans and comic-book devotees. More than a few were Jewish -- frustratingly, Evanier does not give enough ethnic and religious background to fill out that part of the history. They weren't all originally from New York, although a high number had attended the School of Visual Arts. And, most interestingly, they continued to work for Madison Avenue while parodying it for Mad.
Together with the magazine's writers, they made up a bratty, friendly middle ground between the widespread conformist culture of the time and diehard dissidents like Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg. They became wildly popular with the silent generation's youth. In ''Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine'' (1991), the cultural historian Maria Reidelbach says that by 1960 the magazine was read by 43 percent of high school students and 58 percent of college students. Often imitated, Mad artists had the distinction of having their work widely consumed while also inspiring a cultlike following. ''After Mad,'' Patti Smith has said, ''drugs were nothing.''
But you won't get Smith's kind of outsider tribute, or Reidelbach's history, in Evanier's book. And historical context, of the kind Reidelbach gives generously in her book, is very much missed here; on-target parody, satire and caricature depend on it, as do the more interesting studies of them. What we get in ''Mad Art'' are artists' biographies and descriptions of their professional practices. Mad used freelancers; it paid well, and it developed a regular stable. For decades it retained title to original art, which caused controversy among the artists and allowed the magazine to make profits from paperback reprints.
Nevertheless, most of the artists kept contributing to Mad even when their day jobs brought in considerable income. Their other clients included not only advertising agencies but Hallmark Cards, Playboy, DC Comics and Business Week. And there have been more artists (like Tom Cheney, Phil Interlandi and R. J. Matson) working for both The New Yorker and Mad than you might think. Alfred E. Neuman, derived from a smiling dunce who appeared in late-19th-and early-20th-century ads, was developed in 1956 by the painter Norman Mingo into the fully rendered poster boy we know so well.
His evolution as a cover model, presidential candidate and general knucklehead resulted from collaborative efforts by such artists as Bob Clarke, Frank Kelly Freas and, more recently, James Warhola. Similarly, the development of Mort Drucker's film caricatures, the birth of Antonio Prohias's ''Spy vs. Spy,'' the evolution of Dave Berg's series ''The Lighter Side of . . .'' are all well accounted for and illustrated here.
But just as in Sergio Aragonés's drawings, where juicy tidbits appear in every corner of the page, some of the meatiest details in ''Mad Art'' are in the subtext sketching the trajectory of the crossover between straight culture and the magazine. Jack Rickard, for instance, created the original film poster for the movie ''Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.'' Then he satirized that poster on the cover of Mad. As in the magazine's long-running favorite ''The Shadow Knows,'' which showed people going through the motions of everyday activities while their shadows demonstrated what they really thought and wanted to do, in their magazine work the Mad artists let their commercial inks out to run wild in the dark. ''Mad Art'' brings their night jobs and day ones together revealingly.